Rich Asshole Of The Week: Vinod Khosla

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Who me? Steal from the public? Never! Well, maybe just this once.

Who me? Steal from the public? Never! Well, maybe just this once.

So, Vinod Khosla is one of the founders of the venerable Sun Microsystems. He was a brilliant innovator and entrepreneur back in the day. Lately, “he has been experimenting with education and global housing. Vinod is also passionate about alternative energy, petroleum independence, and the environment.”

So, he sounds like an otherwise great guy, right? Rich, successful, and to paraphrase Carl Sagan: “giving something back; a gesture of good will to the people of this little planet who have given—from whom he has taken—so much.”

As long as you filthy mendicants don’t get anywhere near his property, that is.

See, Mr. Charitable here doesn’t want revolting members of the lower-class public like you and I anywhere near his personal multi-million dollar chunk of California coastline, even though the beach he’s restricting access to is a public beach and those access rights are protected by the California State Constitution.

He just ignored that shit, unilaterally blocked off the road, painted over the signs and said “nevermind the laws, everyone out of the water” and he did it because he’s rich and can afford to hire lawyers to gin up the ridiculous (but accepted by the local judge who’d like to be invited over sometime) legal hair-split that long standing public property and resulting access rights for his relatively recently acquired tract of land are in fact invalid because ‘Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo so ha ha the beach is mine and fuck the people who grew up and lived around here before I moved in a few years ago’.

See, the guy is just another mega-rich NIMBY – he’s quite willing (and able) to steal from the public in this case because it suits his desires, which as a guy with a metric fuck-ton of money apparently know no limits. Given his billions, he could likely have re-routed access to the beach or re-landscaped so it doesn’t disturb his 45 cabanas, or his view or whatever – but that’s not what he’s interested in. He wants a private beach. He wants to make OUR public beach into HIS private beach.

I live 3,000 miles away – but public lands are OURS, all of us, everyone in this nation. We’d flip a collective wig if some complete asshat like Jamie Dimon bought up everything surrounding Yellowstone and said “nobody can cross my land to get to the park anymore, too bad” but that’s exactly what Khosla’s doing, and getting away with, so far.

So congratulations, asshole! You found a legal loophole to allow you to steal from your neighbors, none of whom have as much as you are as fortunate to have – pat yourself on the back, for the rest of us, good going, buddy. Morals and ethics have nothing to do with it – you wanted it, found a nebulous way to legally justify it, you did so, and be damned to everyone else.

For shame, sir. I bestow upon thee the title of Rich Asshole Of The Week. Don’t worry too much, sir – I’m confident some of the the big fuckos on Wall Street and Capitol Hill are working overtime to dethrone you.

Author’s note: man, I’m going to start using that one as my excuse for everything from now on: “Your honor, I got high and robbed the bank, the liquor store and then detonated a nuclear weapon in the Chesapeake Bay because I have a waiver under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that I bought for $5 dollars from a flea market in Tijuana. It’s completely legal and trumps all local laws including the Constitution!”

[initial rage-trigger here]

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